As portable electronic devices become more compact, and the number of functions performed by a given device increase, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with a multifunction device. This challenge is particularly significant for handheld portable devices, which have much smaller screens than desktop or laptop computers. This situation is unfortunate because the user interface is the gateway through which users receive not only content but also responses to user actions or behaviors, including user attempts to access a device's features, tools, and functions. Some portable communication devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephones, and the like) have resorted to adding more pushbuttons, increasing the density of push buttons, overloading the functions of pushbuttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data. These conventional user interfaces often result in complicated key sequences and menu hierarchies that must be memorized by the user.
Some portable electronic devices provide email capabilities in addition to other features, such as access to and display of online videos, Internet access, media player features, and cell phone capabilities. Email can either be pushed to a portable device or fetched. Fetching email involves a portable electronic device periodically downloading incoming email from an email server. How fetching is handled can negatively impact performance and battery life of the device and the quality of the user email experience. This is because downloading email can momentarily occupy a significant amount of the communications bandwidth available to a portable electronic device, which must sometimes use a relatively slow network connection. Also, downloading email can slow operation of other applications running on a portable electronic device (such as a video player that is playing streaming video during an email fetch), and the communications required to fetch email can drain battery resources, which are at a premium for portable devices. The quality of the user's email experience can also be negatively impacted depending on when the email is fetched. For example, email that is fetched according to an inflexible schedule is not likely to be fresh when a user is ready to read it.
Accordingly, there is a need for a portable electronic device with email capabilities that performs email fetching in a way that is sensitive to available communication bandwidth, does not monopolize system resources at the expense of other applications that are running on the device, and is sensitive to battery usage. There is also a need for a portable electronic device that performs email fetching in way that does negatively impact the user's email experience or use of other features of the device.